If there are two things I love, its scotch and making my life easier. I decided to take the scripts from my previous post, and roll them into clickable apps. Click to download these zip files, and inside you’ll find two basic, basic apps. Click one, and your desktop icons go away. Click the other, and they show up. Stick them in your dock for simple desktop management goodness.

If you’re anything like me, the crippling shame of your father’s disapproval has defined your entire life. As a result, you compensate by drinking more alcohol than is strictly healthy, and by posting vidcap tutorials to win the love and respect of your peers. As a result, you may find it useful to occasionally hide all the crap on your desktop before you begin.

Sure, you could shell out literally dozen of dollars to do it with deskshade, but wouldn’t you rather roll your own? I know I would! TO THE TERMINAL!

There is a simple terminal command that will kill all of your desktop icons. Check it:

BOOM! Just like that, all of your icons are gone. You’re back to that deep, deep emptiness that only comes from zen-like simplicity or chemical realignment of your brain functions. Once you’ve finished doing your business, you can reload the icons with the following command:

Okay, yes, the title is absolutely link bait. I am the worst kind of internet ghetto barker, flashing neon and shouting lewd incitements to the passersby, hoping to lure them into hot sweaty posts of ill repute.

Yes, my wordpress installation was hacked. No, you shouldn’t panic. It was an old version of WordPress, 2.4, that I had installed on an unused domain for testing purposes. Somebody figured out how to hack the built-in file uploader included in WP, and they were using it to install folders on all the other domains on that same server. The folders they installed generated thousands of link-farm pages. Assholes.

So, I had to go into search and destroy mode. I needed to find every file on my site that had been modified after a certain date. To do that, I used the “find” command, with a few modifiers. Here’s the full command (type it, don’t copy it)

find . = “Find some files for me, starting right here in this directory.”

-name “*” = “I want you to find files where the name matches … um, everything (thus the wildcard).”

-mtime -1 = “Once you find those files, narrow it down to just the ones with a modification time of 1 day or sooner.” If you want to search further back, increase the number to however many days back you want to search.

-print = “When you get those files, print them on the screen.”

| grep -v logs = “Now just before you print those file names, filter out any that have the word “logs” in the name.”

| grep -v cache = “And finally, filter out any that have the word “cache” in the name.”

You can modify how far back you want to search, you can modify the names you want to exclude (logs and cache files will always have recent modification dates, so I exclude them from my results), tweak it until it works for you, and then go forth and destroy the intruding files.

Really? There are really people who just haven’t bothered to hit “update” on their phones yet? I guess I just don’t understand people who don’t install software updates. If only there were some way of punishing that habit, say with code that exploited the unpatched software they refused to update, and making it do bad things. That might be a way of correcting their bad habit!